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Straykitty…..again…

August 28, 2010

History, to a child of the Second War such as myself, was little more than Egyptian-built pyramids and the Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s velvety voice piped into hot public school classrooms.

In the ’40s, our grade school’s current events were mostly the ribbons of road and small towns we could glimpse from the windows of automobiles. They were two-lane downtown streets with railroad tracks crossing at the intersection of the First National Bank and Woolsworth, cheap gasoline at a tatty station on the edge of town, hot oilfield roads, ca-chunking Standard Oil pumps to keep the black blood flowing.

Our wars were marked at the great train depots which dotted the nation. In Little Rock and Chicago and St. Louis olive-drab uniforms filled passenger cars and lined the huge echoing terminals that smelled of wet coal. Thousands and thousands of men hunched on uncomfortable railway seats and spilled out into the aisles. Their eyes were tired. They sat, quietly smoking as they found their way home from Europe and then immediately back again to Korea.

What did we children know then? Nothing. Edward R. Murrow was a voice from the radio on the table. We eagerly awaited Sunday nights with Jack Benny and Charlie McCarthy. The truth of what was happening came to us many decades later. It was many years when we learned about the compromise of our presidents and manipulation of Congress.

We learned how the wealth and treasure of this nation was squandered — communist agents in high places…Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss…Lend-Lease…$4,000,000,000+ to Stalin in the U.S.S.R….names and facts that meant nothing to children who now are called the Silent Generation. Men behind men behind men: Colonel Mandell House, Henry Morgenthau, Bernard Baruch.

Yes, we are the Silent Generation of today. We didn’t see ourselves as so — we were working men in khakis whose great strength was to be quiet and aproned women whose profound relief was indoor plumbing.

Then we were gifted, our Silent Generation. We were gifted with the Internet.

The Internet. The Internet brought us out of a tunnel. The Internet taught us truth. Now we stagger in disbelief at where we have come from. Lies. Books and books of lies. Years and years of lies. Cemeteries full of lies. How could we not have seen it? How could we not have perceived that the Anglo-American focus of two horrific World Wars was a small parcel of land in the Middle East? A tragedy on an incomprehensible scale. It was always so.

A Silent Generation now has a voice. We have quickened. Do the men who step from their great banking houses know where they are in this fragile spiral of Time? Do they come from their secret meetings and plan to shape history as they used to? That age has passed. We know the truth now. We are not all dead. We can say yes and we can say no. Do those gray suits know that our eyes are no longer blind? Do they know fear?

VivekAnand,
I’ve been thinking about your comment that the lurking monster on the internet is pornography and you know you’re absolutely right. Of course, the Internet was too dangerous to leave alone and so we see this EXPLOSION is free, streaming porn (with mouse over previews) sites all over the web so that not only is the vast majority not going to find illumination, they will find only degradation and bad vibrations.
The Internet was a gift. It is almost co-opted now. Earlier, the chances of hitting a radical website or forum were huge, it being a radical new frontier and all that. With the mainstreaming of the Internet, we find again, as we do in our bookshops, masses upon masses of mainstream thought (propaganda) with the occasional sliver of truth, getting more and more sliver-like each day.
I would say the Internet is at the point where marginal returns begin to diminish – we get a fractured, atomised population with tweet-length attention spans, network addiction, the illusion of political activity and connectedness, the illusion of edification, the possibility of a completely virtual life except for eating and spitting….
The main strength of the Internet was not so much the content on it but the change in consciousness it engendered in its users. Back in the 90s, it was edgy, radical, intense and liberating. No caste, creed, race based judgements. Pure objectivity. Logic. Equality. These consciousness changing ideas are now gone from the Internet (as they have from hip-hop, punk, capoeira, Che Guevara and every other method of protest) and so as far as the gift goes, yes, it was VERY VERY precious, but it is not permanent. It was fleeting. We’re watching the sun set on the radical internet.

I am slowly logging off and I find myself much more relaxed. The world is not so bad when you sit by the edge of the fields and watch the birds fly through the sky.

Precisely Sid. It has been co-opted and sex is such an easy and time-tested way to do the co-opting too. In the Control-complex, TV (regulated) + Internet (unregulated) is a dream.
In fact, I’m sure, though I’ve not studied the question per-se, that subliminal advertising is alive and well in the net.
I have 4 web-sites and links from there that I go to every day now.
Staying with dial-up instead of getting broadband (easily available where i live) was the best decision I made.

evocative post, straykitty – particularly when you speak of the internet, “we stagger in disbelief at where we have come from”. . . and how we have been lied to, with intent.
I’ve always been fascinated with cultural conditioning, the similarities and differences between cultures, and how a “new” government’s agenda is enforced, what gets rejected or embraced by the populations. . . but some of what I’m learning, reading, understanding – it heightens a sense of vulnerability, and at the same time feels most empowering. . . and it will continue to unfold – pandora’s box.

also feel drawn towards responding to your post, svs – specifically pornography and the internet. . . as you describe, what was once radical and raw, has been co-opted, as all original ideas are. . . relative to “punk” – as someone who dived right in at an early age, and felt a freedom from early conditioning falling away, I think we can still carry a germ of the original infection, and let it mutate as we age. . . tho’ three decades on it’s difficult to describe just how alive living outside the social constructs allows one to feel, DIY culture still resonates throughout my daily lived life. . .

as to pornography. . . it continues to surprise me how entrenched it has become, how ubiquitous & thoroughly embraced & justified by diverse groups of people, including those who consider themselves “above” many cultural groupthinks. . .
I had an experience a couple days ago, reading on a financial blog a post that graphically depicted a sexualised war crime, it was obviously posted to shock, and it did. . . although I only read it once, then logged immediately, there is some imagery that has not been purged, and may never leave my mind. . . trauma is like that, and empathy with trauma is visceral. . . I realise that such acts are perpetrated daily, hideous desecration of human beingness, I am not naive. . . I think what surprised me most was the shrugging off, ignoring of the post, back to the sexualised pictures and jokes, as before. . .
this is what pornography does, it numbs & pre-occupies minds, and it turns humans into objects of lust, de-humans. . . billion dollar industry infecting minds with Pavlovian “feed me” needs. . . sadly, perfected by those who have an agenda, globally, it feeds right into the deceptions. . . to get humans to destroy themselves from within, and without, the worst plague.

A note about comments

Greetings. This being a place to primarily exchange ideas, I thought I'd share a few pointers for comments, which in my mind would result in a healthy exchange of ideas.
a) 0 profanity policy. Any curse word, even if #$%$ will lead to automatic deletion. They are un-necessary.
b) if posting a link, whether to your own blog or otherwise, please ensure that you are keeping with the theme of the post you are commenting on and have something original to say in that regard. Sometimes just a link works fine too and oftentimes an off-topic tug is needed. But good to keep in mind as a general guiding principle.
c) 0 ad homenim policy. needless and dialouge destroying. If you have not found a way to move beyond the messenger, then that should be priority one, before commenting.
Appreciate the understanding and against censorship.
Regards all around a big thank you to all the folks who have come by and engaged.